WoW Alts

Throughout my MMO career, I've had alts. I've never been able to create just one character and go with that, even though I've always had very clear main characters. In WoW, I've only recently realised how much of a boost was given to the ease of levelling for the lower levels, and started pushing a couple of my alts there.

My play style in WoW has always been a bit odd - I practice what Spinks calls 'slow gaming', which in my case means that I'm usually much too busy tooling around with the economic game, tradeskills, wardrobe addons, small bits of odd exploration, some rep grinds (must. get. epic. fishing rod!) and the like to actually catch the level train. Wormson is currrently closing on level 74, and might hit level 80 at some stage, although it'll likely be by accident, turning in a jewelcrafting daily or something. He's engaged in tailoring and jewelcrafting more than questing, and I'm really enjoying that.

My death knight, Syonn, is just barely level 60, and has been parked there for a while. He will eventually get to 65, and after that, all bets are off, as he can then max out both his inscription and his enchanting. Which, as far as I'm concerned, was the whole point of having a death knight - a tradeskills character without having to grind levels! Blizzard's fascist one-DK-per-server rule put paid to my intention of an army of crafting death knights, though.

And of course, inscription and jewelcrafting really require a herbalist and a miner to supply them. So enter Chalcedony, currently a level 17 shadow priest, who's working on herbalism and skinning, and Selgorsh, a level 24 warrior, miner and skinner. The skinning is because a) there's good money in that thar leather, and b) it physically pains me not be able to 'fully loot' a mob, and c) they can't usefully track two node-based gathering skills at once.

Chalcedony and Selgorsh will likely never pass 65, if indeed they ever get that high. But they're well-supplied with gear, well-funded, and are fun to play. At this stage in the game, with the ease of levelling lower-end characters, it's impossible to do all the quests at a given level before they turn grey, so for both of them, I'm picking up one quest, chasing it to the end, abandoning anything that's turned grey, and repeating. It's entertaining, and the mid-level gathered goods actually net a fair bit of money on the auction house.

Speaking of which, the last alt, Malamor, is my banker/auctioneer. He's a priest - I think he's level 6 or so - and spends all his time in Undercity, taking in goods from the others, and marketing them, and engaging in a little bit of auction house manipulation as he goes. When I'm paying attention, I can pull down 400g a day without much effort from the AH, and it's always immensely entertaining to me to see what sells, what doesn't, and try to work out why. The TBC blue gems I had left over, for instance, went out like wildfire, except for the Talasites, of which I've a pile left. Why? No idea. They were always the cheapest of the TBC blues, and presumably the cuts from them are not terribly useful to anyone any more.